Williams duo struggle for balance

With Ralf qualifying seventh fastest - with a time 1.244s awayn from his brother Michael's pole lap - and Juan Pablo ninth, with laps of 1m19.008s and 1m19.377s respectively, all is clearly not right on the handling front despite this circuit being the one on which the team has conducted more testing than anywhere else.

"There is no doubt that we can't be satisfied with our qualifying result," reported Ralf, "as our pace is too far away from the top teams. However, I believe that we can do well tomorrow with our race strategy. It's now a metter of us hoping that we have the right balance to enable us to score a useful amount of points."

Juan Pablo was similarly frustrated: "It's been a difficult weekend but I think that we've finally sorted my car which is still not very good but at least its handling has improved and it's now driveable."

Chief Operations Engineer Sam Michael acknowledges that it has been a struggle so far: "Obvuiously, we would have liked to have qualified higher up, but we've spent the meeting so far looking for improvements in the cars' balance which was bettered again for second qualifying. Now we'll work on optimising our strategy for tomorrow and hope for a good race."